A sudden surge of interest

This has been an exciting week. On February 5, historian Heather Cox Richardson mentioned the Nerd Reich in her popular newsletter, Letters from an American, which has millions of subscribers. She quoted my recent essay about how Elon Musk's destruction of the United States government mirrors Curtis Yarvin's "butterfly revolution" playbook:

Today journalist Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich noted that a thinker popular with the technological elite in 2022 laid out a plan to gut the U.S. government and replace it with a dictatorship. This would be a “reboot” of the country, Curtis Yarvin wrote, and it would require a “full power start,” a reference to restarting a stalled starship by jumping to full power, which risks destroying the ship.

Yarvin called for “giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization,” headed by the equivalent of the rogue chief executive officer of a corporation who would destroy the public institutions of the democratic government. Trump—whom Yarvin dismissed as weak—would give power to that CEO, who would “run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts.” “Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems.” Once loyalists have replaced civil servants in a new ideological “army,” the CEO “will throw it directly against the administrative state—not bothering with confirmed appointments, just using temporary appointments as needed. The job of this landing force is not to govern.” The new regime must take over the country and “perform the real functions of the old, and ideally perform them much better.” It must “seize all points of power, without respect for paper protections.”

Duran noted that Vice President J.D. Vance has echoed Yarvin’s prescriptions and that Trump sidekick billionaire Elon Musk appears to be putting Yarvin’s blueprint into action. “Musk is taking a systematic approach,” Duran wrote, “one that has been outlined in public forums for years.”

This created a healthy influx of new readers from around the country and the world, and this newsletter now has 172 paid subscribers! That's not enough to make this my full-time job, but it's enough to give me hope that this effort is worth continuing.

Timing is everything. In recent weeks, I had thought about winding down this newsletter and moving on to other things. Don't get me wrong: I think the rise of this scary tech power cult and its marriage to the MAGA movement is probably the most important political story of the 21st century. If a handful of billionaires can simply buy the United States of America to destroy it, that's history in the making. I have done my best to raise the alarm in this obscure newsletter and a series of articles in the New Republic. But I think this story deserves to be taken a lot more seriously by many more people.

Though it may not be evident from the outside, I am not a full-time staffer of any journalism outlet. I am a freelance writer, which means I work various other jobs to fund my own research and journalism. This is not a complaint – it is the lot of many a writer throughout history, and I'm proud to be a part of the tradition. It gives me precious freedom. Believe me, I could never have told this story in the pages of a mainstream newspaper. But while it delights me to take on these Tech Goliaths from such a disadvantaged position, it won't be enough.

The world needs a well-funded and staffed organization entirely devoted to charting and countering the rise of tech fascism, and that organization needs a full range of communications tools. We need the major news outlets – and the Democratic Party – to start telling people about this stuff. Right now, I don't see that either of those things will happen, even as these men work to destroy our country – and the future of democracy and freedom – in front of our very eyes. (One ray of hope: Yesterday, Van Jones mentioned "Dark Enlightenment" and "NRx" on CNN, urging viewers to Google those terms to understand what is currently happening. When even the CNN pundits are figuring it out, perhaps there's a chance it will break through.)

People keep asking me what we can do. Well, the first step is to understand exactly what is happening. I started this newsletter because I saw a largely untold story and decided to tell it. At first, I considered this a local story about politics in the San Francisco Bay Area. But it has accelerated into a national story much faster than I had anticipated.

I did not set out to write about this subject. Instead, I stumbled across it. Though I have helped to explain what's happening in a clear and systematic way that has reached many people, I am not the first to write about these subjects.

Here are a few people and/or pieces that have been very influential on my thinking:

• "The Quiet Political Rise of David Sacks, Silicon Valley's Prophet of Urban Doom," by Jacob Silverman, The New Republic. When I read this piece in October 2022, I got mad at myself because I realized I had not looked deeply enough into the politics of the tech plutocrats who had become increasingly influential in Bay Area politics. I had mentioned David Sacks in a few pieces I wrote as editorial page editor of the San Francisco Examiner. Why had I not gone deeper? Jacob has a book coming out this year, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, which is available for pre-order. Follow Jacob on BlueSky.

• "Zoning Out" by Daniel Immerwahr, New York Review of Books. This review of Quinn Slobodian's Crack Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy really accelerated my thinking. Slobodian's book is a must-read that tells the story of how a certain class of billionaires, tired of democracy, are looking for ways to create democracy-free zones around the world. Buy it on Bookshop to support independent bookstores (and this newsletter!).

• Emily Mills, an independent researcher, has indefatigably charted the political machinations of extreme tech politics in the Bay Area – often seeming like a lone voice in the wilderness. If you're still on X/Twitter, please give her a follow.
• "Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel is Placing His Biggest Bets," by James Pogue in Vanity Fair. This is an eye-opening and prescient read. It's behind a paywall, but it's worth every penny. Vanity Fair does some excellent and penetrating political reporting and deserves support.

• "Curtin Yarvin Wants American Democracy Toppled. He Has Some Prominent Republican Fans," by Andrew Prokop in Vox. Back in 2022, Prokop wrote a piece that explained Yarvin's anti-democratic philosophy, his connection to J.D. Vance, and linked to his Substack essay on the Butterfly Revolution. Follow Andrew Prokop on BlueSky.

• "The Wide Angle: Understanding TESCREAL — the Weird Ideologies Behind Silicon Valley’s Rightward Turn," by Dave Troy in the Washington Spectator. Troy has been way ahead of most journalists in outlining the ideological extremism coming out of Silicon Valley, and he has generously shared my work with his large audience. If you don't know what TESCREAL means, find out! Follow Dave Troy on BlueSky.

• "Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich," by Corey Pein, The Baffler. All the way back in 2014, Pein had a critical eye on the strange new ideology bubbling up from Silicon Valley. His piece begins:

One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows:

1. Retire all government employees with full pensions.
2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.
3. Appoint [Google executive chairman] Eric Schmidt CEO of America.

Sound familiar? Magazines and small journals are so crucial because they take risks and peer into the future. Pein was writing about Yarvin back when Yarvin was still calling himself "Mencius Moldbug." Follow Corey Pein on BlueSky.

• And then there's science fiction. People often bring up Snow Crash, Bioshock, and many other works that illuminate dark visions of future fascism and its discontents. I am a fan of Octavia Butler's Parable duology. And don't even get me started on Orwell...

This is hardly an exhaustive list. Every writer stands on the shoulders of other writers – too many to count. Now that this newsletter is getting a bit of attention because of other writers, I wanted to make sure to acknowledge some of the writers who have most affected me on his particular journey.

I'll close with something I wrote in my first post here, nearly one year ago, when I was writing this newsletter mostly to myself.

I have spent much of the past year searching through newspaper archives for various research projects. Reading through old newspapers has impressed upon me the lasting importance of journalistic acts. So much of the focus on the newspaper industry today is on getting clicks to survive or blowing up on social media in order to drive revenue. Been there, done that.

Even more important than meeting the daily metrics, however, is to create a clear record of history as it unfolds. Someone has to bear witness and write it down, and the value of that goes far beyond the generation of pennies.

So, I'm not looking for huge readership or massive clicks. This is the simply the "journal" part of my journalism, a record created for the simple sake of memory.

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